


a bridge of birds

by evocates



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Chinese Language, Inaccurate Star Wars history, M/M, More Chinese history and culture than you can shake a stick at
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 11:18:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9654152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evocates/pseuds/evocates
Summary: Reaching out, Baze took Chirrut’s hand. He pressed it over his heart and said, stumbling and halting in Cantonese, “Can’t you feel my heart beating in tandem with yours?”Chirrut’s fingers curled inwards, nails scraping over Baze’s black robes. He stepped closer, and his face tucked into the crook of Baze’s neck.He said, “It isn’t enough.”Words on their bones kept distance between them. Their city fell apart, again and again.But they would learn to stand amidst the clouds, nonetheless: first on the unsteady wings of swallows, then with wings of their own making.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Inaccurate _Star Wars_ history because I fucked that over for the sake of real world history. So many references to Chinese culture and history here that this sentence serves as a warning. All of the relevant bits are, hopefully, explained in enough detail within the fic itself. Also mentions and descriptions of revolutions, suicide, and the rise of a totalitarian government with the associated horrible violence. 
> 
> Dedicated to [kikibug13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13), who betas everything I write, and with whom I first cooked up the idea of the tattoos.

They have all seen them, the tattoos: the rearing heron etched in silver and grey on Chirrut's back, its outstretched wings touching the curves of his shoulders; the sprawling spikes of lightning flowers, the same pale blue as Chirrut's eyes, down Baze's arm.

Cassian saw them first, awake and gasping with pain. Cassian who bit out, "They're Jedhan," through gritted teeth when the medics tried to pull Baze and Chirrut apart for their treatment. "It's probably a symbol of their marriage. Let them be."

Bodhi saw them first in their full forms. Submerged in bacta, eyes wide open and heart pounding in his ears, he watched as Baze clasped his hand over his arm right where the thickest flowers seemed to burst from beneath his tanned skin. He saw, too, the unnatural arch of Chirrut's neck as he tipped his head back, some strange desperate attempt to touch the ink with his own skin. 

He had squeezed his eyes shut then. Trying to not gasp, trying to not choke, the bacta heavy and yet so empty around him.

It was Jyn – Jyn with courage given by the easy "little sister" so frequently breathed from Baze's lips – who finally asked, "How long have the two of you been married?"

They were alone in the medbay. Perhaps the base itself had been emptied, everyone escaping outside to watch the skies with the Death Star looming overhead. They – Rogue One, the ones who hadn’t been supposed to come back but had – had woken far too late to help with any of the efforts, and all they could do was wait.

So they did, calm while the death that had seared their bones clean stood once more on their shadows. There was no fear in any of them; their muscles were only strong enough to hold their determination to continue to be thieves and rogues, stealing breath right from the open mouth of death. 

To breathe, and to speak; spreading out their histories in front of each other so they would know that at least four others had once seen them as all that they were, all that they had been. Whole enough to touch; not just letters impersonally printed on the screen of a datapad.

Chirrut smiled. But it was Baze, tucked up behind him with his arm around Chirrut's waist, who gruffly answered: "We're not."

"What?" Jyn blurted.

"It didn't fit," Chirrut said, still serene. He ducked his head down, and chuffed a laugh against his own shoulder. His breath skittered over the feather-tip of the heron's wing that peeped over the curve, grey ink shimmering silver underneath fluorescent light. "When it could have..."

"Then it was time itself that didn't fit," Baze said. He wasn't looking at any of them, attention fixed upon Chirrut. But Baze seemed to have gained some strange telepathy after Scarif, for he picked up on their confusion anyway.

"We are of Jedha," he said. When Jyn blinked, the side of his mouth quirked into a small, wry smile. "It's hard to explain."

“Bodhi?"

Cassian's voice was soft, but Bodhi still jerked anyway, his eyes darting from side to side. To Baze he seemed like a sparrow with one wing splintered, terrified even in the gentlest of hands.

"I... I don't know," he swallowed. He raised a hand, as if to run it through his hair, and seemed to notice the bandages covering him from fingertips to shoulder all over again. "Wrong part of the city, I guess.”

"Jedha, City of Pilgrims," Chirrut murmured. "Jedha, City of Many."

"It's not your fault," Baze translated.

***

Chirrut's sleeves were rolled up, thin cotton framing his tensed wrist. He held a brush in his hand, tip the shade of the dust that gathered on Temple’s rooftop. There was water in his inkstone, but the inkstick was resting to the side, untouched. 

Without speaking, Baze folded his legs and sat down next to him. He picked up the stick and started to grind. The water darkened quickly, and Chirrut dipped his brush in. The ink was barely thick enough to cling to the bristles; the Temple's supplies, then; not Baze's family's. 

Well, those would've run out sooner or later anyway.

The ivory-pale paper was soon stained. Not with Basic, but with characters in a language the two of them shared and knew. The Temple ran on Basic, and it was the tongue most often spoken, but everyone on Jedha knew at least another.

Impossible not to when government officials walked around with their shaved foreheads gleaming in the pale sun and their long braids swinging behind their backs, forswearing their allegiances. 

“ _Jiàqǔ_ ," Baze read out. He let out a breath through his nose. "Ah."

They were both men now, Chirrut having just reached the Jedha majority of seventeen two weeks ago. It was, Baze supposed, long past time for him to consider marriage. Chirrut, a foundling, surely had as much responsibility to start a clan as much as Baze had once had to continue his.

"No," Chirrut said. He turned to Baze, and finally his lips curved into that familiar smile that outshone the sun, dark eyes turning up at the corners. "I just want you to look at them."

"I've seen them before," Baze said, dry, but he leaned forward anyway. The ragged ends of his hair - uneven, the expected casualty of the knife he had used to slice off his braid - brushed his shoulders. He shoved them out of the way.

The characters were writ large, side by side on the paper turned horizontal, in the way of Basic instead of the usual up-to-down way of the language that supposedly belonged to them both:

Chirrut’s finger pointed to the one on the left. “A woman, on the day of her marriage: standing next to her new family,” he said. His Mandarin was flat, tongue made too swift by the Cantonese he had learned in the orphanage before coming to the Temple to properly stay on the flatter tones of Baze’s native tongue.

His finger shifted right. “A man on the day of his: retrieving a woman, his actions weighing her down.” He cocked his head. “Don’t you think it’s strange?”

That familiar smile had turned lopsided, and there was a look in Chirrut’s eyes that Baze did not want to understand. His fingers twitched at his side, and he ran them over the soft fuzz on top of his head – where the hairs were starting to grow back out – instead.

“I don’t know,” he said, the lie tasting heavy and sticky on his tongue. “They’re just characters, aren’t they? They have been this way for a long time, and they don’t have to mean anything.”

Chirrut lowered his head. Soft strands of his hair brushed over his eyes, wisps much like the lashes that curled above his cheeks. Baze’s bones ached with the need to touch, but he tucked his hands under the table and clenched them. He, who had walked out of his family for the Temple, for Chirrut’s sake, would not be so selfish as to drag Chirrut down the same dirty, rock-strewn path of the faithless one who had thrown away his heart of piety to let it shatter. 

Silence stretched between them. Chirrut traced the lines of the characters, over and over, staining his fingers. Baze took a deep breath. 

“Sister Ilia told me,” he switched back to Basic, tongue halting and slow, “meaningless letters could coil themselves into sounds that form the skeleton of words’ meanings even when we don’t notice it.” He scratched the tip of his ear, hidden behind the fall of hair. 

“The word for the Force, soft in the beginning and hard in the middle, and trailing off into softness in the end… In itself, it already recalls the necessary balance we have to achieve.”

Lifting his head, Chirrut quirked an eyebrow at him. Shadows still lingered at the corners of his eyes. Baze cleared his throat, and punched him lightly on the arm.

“I’m trying to say that I get what you’re saying,” he huffed out. “That’s all.”

“Do you, really?”

In the practice ring, Chirrut was known as reckless. Or worse: multitudes of tongues wrapped around differently-shaped and sounding words all meaning the same thing, _idiot_. Baze had joined them, sometimes, when Chirrut would dance away from their taunts, laughing, feet quick and beautiful like the lightning that flashed across Jedha’s red skies on the rare storms.

But now, with Chirrut’s callused fingertips brushing away the loose strands of hair from his face, with his warm palm slowly, so slowly, cupping his cheek, Baze thought that they had been wrong. Not Chirrut the reckless, but Chirrut the brave.

They had been walking upon the same path towards each other, but of course it would be Chirrut to call down the first swallow to form the bridge upon which they could stand together.

Finally, he allowed himself to reach out. Chirrut’s pulse beat like a butterfly’s wings beneath his fingertips, his eyelids fluttering as Baze stroked a line down his throat.

“I do.” He smiled, lopsided as always because he was still not used to it. Years running along with Chirrut by his side, and one more away from the hallowed and hollow halls of his father, and his face would still not obey. “Really.”

When Chirrut kissed him, lips tremulous, it tasted like inevitability. Baze closed his eyes. He wrenched himself away. Chirrut opened his mouth, but Baze caressed the curve of a collarbone with his thumb, a vain attempt to keep away the shadows as he reached for the paper. It crumpled satisfyingly loudly in his hand. 

“We don’t need any of that,” he whispered, fierce. “None of their words. None of their things. Nothing that would try to trap us.”

Slowly, he splayed his hand out above Chirrut’s chest. Still half-grown, the corded muscles stretched over the ribs a little too tight.

“Just this,” he said. He did not know where this courage had come from, but the earth had finally settled beneath his feet when it had always rocked during his eighteen years. “All I need is this.”

So strange when the bridge they were to walk upon was built by birds with branches thin and weak, and their feet brushed constantly with the flutters of the swallows’ wings. But the skies had spread themselves ahead of him with Chirrut’s shimmering-dark eyes, and every hitching exhale from those plush lips gave Baze courage. 

Chirrut surged forward, a river; Baze, a rock barely clinging to the shore, let himself slip away into the rushing currents of him. Chirrut held his face close, their teeth clacking together, inelegant; their breaths too loud and harsh across each other’s dry lips. Baze found himself laughing despite himself, grasping at Chirrut, pulling him by his robes to sit on top of him.

They fumbled at each other, Chirrut’s hiccupping giggles brushing over Baze’s jaw, his neck, everywhere that Chirrut could reach. This should be awkward, Baze knew, but they had been revolving around each other for so long, two rocks circling around the planet that was the Temple and the Force; made of different stars and falling because of shared faith onto the same path.

“All is as the Force wills it.”

The voice was not his, but Chirrut’s. Chirrut the irreverent whom the older sisters and brothers scolded for praying only when he was caught in the red-handed for a prank.

But there was no mischief in his eyes now as his forehead rested against Baze’s, nothing but a fragile hope and a strange-familiar tenderness as his fingers traced Baze’s lips.

“As the Force wills it,” Baze said, soft and quiet. He slipped a hand into Chirrut’s hair, the short strands difficult to grasp so he might as well get some practice now.

When he smiled, he wasn’t sure if his lips moved, or if the gesture simply shone out of his eyes. His face did not complain like it usually did.

“As we will it, too.”

***

“Jedha is of the Mid Rim,” Bodhi said quietly, tipping his head up to look at the ceiling. “Most of those who settled there came from elsewhere, looking for a better life.” His lips curved, a smile aimed into nothingness. “Or they found meaning in their lives during their pilgrimage, and decided to stay.”

The ghosts of his mother and sister sat among them, weighing down the quiet even further. When Chirrut reached out to close his hand around the boy’s wrist, Baze did not begrudge him the touch even as his own skin turned cold.

“When travellers came, they brought not only themselves, but their worlds with them,” Chirrut said. He sank back against Baze further, leaning his full weight on him. “Their words and their inks. Their bones and their hearts.” Baze, supported by the wall behind him, felt his ribs ache, his burns tugging in protest. He ignored them and held Chirrut even tighter. 

“On Jedha, there is a saying of the city,” Bodhi continued, picking up the thread. “You will not walk down the street without hearing at least a dozen different tongues, few of which you can understand, and seeing a dozen more different kinds of faces, most of which will be alien and strange to you.”

“It doesn’t sound like many worlds that I’ve been on,” Jyn said, voice soft and so full of wonder.

Ducking his head down, Bodhi smiled. The soft warmth of it chased away the ghosts, and he tipped his head backwards. “There is no city like Jedha in the whole universe,” he said.

“Yeah,” Cassian nodded. “I’ve heard that about it, but I’ve always wondered… How do you manage it? How do you keep peace when there are so many different kinds of people?” 

His eyes, narrowed and bright as they darted between Bodhi and Chirrut, reminded Baze of a warrior he had met once at the city’s biggest marketplace. Seated behind her stall filled with knives, she watched the milling crowds while polishing her blaster, her shoulders tensed like she expected war to break out at any moment. 

Baze shook his head as Chirrut’s shoulders started to tremble with his laughter. He ran his hand over the edges of the bandages he could feel beneath Chirrut’s medbay-issued robe.

“We didn’t,” he said, simply. “Even before the Empire came, we hovered constantly on the edge of a knife, always waiting.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Bodhi protested immediately, like Baze knew he would. “Things were… There were fights, sometimes. But… but I remember that everything was _okay_.”

“You’re young,” Chirrut said. His thumb stroked lightly between the thin bones of Bodhi’s wrist, skimming over the skin peeking out from beneath white cloth. “This was before your time.”

***

They were Guardians when the Lord of Jedha fell, having achieved their fifth _duan_ just a few months before. Their light blue under-robes had been a common sight on the streets for weeks as they stood guard at the marketplace, at the residence areas, protecting the civilians from the rising war. 

Both the revolutionaries and the Lord's soldiers wanted the Temple’s support. Those doors that had refused no one had seen a constant stream of visitors, both those with their hair braided and shaved and those with theirs thickly curled; both those with their skins the colour of sand and those coloured like the bark of the rare trees. 

But despite all of the offers and supplications, the Temple took no sides. The Masters murmured that they would not interfere; whether the new would triumph over the old, or if the old would still stand tall and proud upon the corpses of its dissenters, would be the will of the Force.

The Temple was safe; the kyber and the Force held too closely to the hearts of all within the moon for either the Lord or the revolutionaries to dare raise a hand against them, no matter how high their frustrations grew. So Baze took his lightbow – still borrowed, still made by hands not his own – and Chirrut his staff – from the practice room, easily broken and replaceable – and they protected all they could.

When the Lord fell, his blood stained the gleaming off-world marble of his courtyard. The camera had been held too close, and the red spraying from his split throat stained the screens all over the moon. His officials, forced to their knees, bowed their heads, and strands of their hair scattered like grains of sand as their braids were sliced, one by one.

A gesture of mercy from the new victors. Better a braid than a neck. Baze, standing beside Chirrut in the Temple’s great halls, could still remember the weight of pride thrice-coiled tugging on his scalp, and knew the mercy was in fact cruelty in disguise.

“They will all be dead by the end of the week,” he told Chirrut when they were dismissed once the prayers for the Lord’s passing and a peaceful transition were finished. “By their own hands.”

The courtyard’s marble was smooth and always cold to the touch. But to be so defeated, to be so humiliated… It would be kinder, Baze knew, to have set glass shards upon the ground to cut them to the bone. The lost blood and legs would be easier to bear.

Chirrut did not reply. He had been quiet for the past year as the whispers of dissent that had always existed had grown into its deafening, unrelenting roar. Baze couldn’t blame him: Chirrut with his skin like sand but with bangs long enough to brush across his eyes; Chirrut who wrote Chinese but who spoke Cantonese; Chirrut whose body belonged to the Lord and his officials, but whose tongue twisted into shapes owned by those who were trampled upon.

Baze understood, but his hair had grown long enough to need to be tied back away from his eyes, now. The tail brushed the back of his ribs. He had never braided the strands, and would never again.

Reaching back, he made to loosen the cord that kept it back, but Chirrut stilled his hand. Dark, dark eyes turned towards him, and Baze allowed himself to be pressed against the door. His lightbow and Chirrut’s staff both clattered to the ground, but the sacredness of objects had escaped him from the first moment Chirrut had cupped his face with his hands and taught him the sanctity of skin.

“It could have been you,” Chirrut breathed against his skin. His fingers sank into Baze’s hair, pulling the strands free. “How could you speak like this, when it could have been you?” 

For the past year, Baze had been waiting for him to pluck those words from the air and breathe sound into them. He could not help but smile, wrapping his arms around Chirrut, drawing him close enough that he could feel the rapid thrumming of his heart against his own.

“I made my choice long ago,” he said. 

“How…” Chirrut swallowed. “I don’t understand. How could you…”

Chirrut cared so much, and so quickly. Chirrut smiled at everyone, and could not be trusted to eat alone on the streets because he would give all of his food to anyone who asked, no matter if they were truly children in need or mere cheats.

Baze was far more selfish.

“I will mourn them,” he said. “But I will mourn the blood that is spilled, and the limbs that were bound by webs that were light but so strong that they could no longer think of walking away. I will mourn all that far more than what I might have lost.” He brushed a thumb beneath Chirrut’s eyes. “For I have turned my back on them, and I’m looking at you.”

He meant it as reassurance, but Chirrut’s eyes snapped open and he pushed himself away. He stared at Baze, lips curved into a bow Baze knew better than his own pressed into a line. “If you can walk away so easily from this, then how do I know you won’t walk easily away from _me_?”

How could Baze explain? His faith, his devotion, all that he knew only that it _was,_ and never how it came to be. His world was not one of words; he never managed to pick up Chirrut’s native tongue, no matter how easily Chirrut had wrapped his tongue around Baze’s.

Reaching out, Baze took Chirrut’s hand. He pressed it over his heart and said, stumbling and halting in Cantonese, “Can’t you feel my heart beating in tandem with yours?”

Chirrut’s fingers curled inwards, nails scraping over Baze’s black robes. He stepped closer, and his face tucked into the crook of Baze’s neck.

He said, “It isn’t enough.”

Baze wrapped his arms around Chirrut’s back, and held him tight. He squeezed his eyes shut for he knew all too well what Chirrut felt: the bridge upon which they stood was made of swallows with fragile bones, capricious birds called to the skies and made to bear their weight by the half-song of their exhales and touches. Too much weight from the Masters’ disapproving eyes would scatter the flock. 

Or, worse still, Chirrut would one day stop singing, and Baze would fall. Baze had no song of his own to charm the birds to bear his weight, so he would fall. Down, down to where he would, he knew, be shattered entirely

“Do you remember,” his voice cracked. He swallowed. “Do you remember, years ago, when you wrote me the characters for marriage?”

“Yes,” Chirrut said, his voice muffled but still so strong, the sound of it shaking Baze to his bones. “I will never forget any moment I spend with you.”

“Unfair,” Baze said, the childish word slipping out of him before he could help himself. Chirrut always did this, shoving words glitteringly precious like carved kyber into Baze’s unsuspecting, clumsy hands. “You can’t say that and…”

Chirrut’s hand cupped the back of his neck. His breath skittered over Baze’s skin. He did not shush, but Baze clicked his teeth together and tried again anyway:

“It’s a new world,” he said.

The world might change. They might have a chance to gain something to hold onto, something real and solid, even if it was just a piece of paper.

But even as Baze said it, he knew it would not be true. He could tell by the bitterness of Chirrut’s smile, pressed against his skin, that he understood.

“Not new enough,” Chirrut said. “The roots are too deep.”

Their new leaders looked different, _were_ different. But the people Baze had long turned his back towards had been the first to settle into Jedha; had been the first to set up the Temple, long ages before the Jedi even discovered the kyber to be useful for their lightsabres. Their words, their beliefs, were not merely the stone carvings that made up the Temple’s pillars but the very water, seeping into the dry soil to feed every single living thing.

The languages might be different, but their ink still needed moisture. Their tongues might be different, but their throats still needed to drink. 

How could you tell a tree to take anything but water to survive? 

“I am still yours,” Baze said, made helpless by words. Words on a piece of paper long burned, but which wove webs of images that sunk beneath their skins, twining threads of how things should be around their bones.

Even if they could, they wouldn’t. Words on a paper could not defeat words on bones. 

Chirrut splayed his hand upon the curve of his shoulder, then moved down. His nails raked lines down the sleeve, light enough to raise merely goosebumps on Baze’s skin instead of welts.

“There are ways,” he said. “Maybe.”

The muscles on Chirrut’s back were more pronounced now than they had been years ago, but the knobs of his spine still felt the same. Baze counted them now, murmuring the numbers into Chirrut’s hair.

“Yes,” he said. He could see a shape unfolding behind his mind’s eye, one that was and was not him. A wish to be made half-real. “There are ways.” 

Once, on his father’s lips, there had been a story of a man whose honour was etched upon his back with shed blood and spilled ink. Perhaps their attempts would not reach the bone, but if they marked themselves on each other…

It would not wash away. It would not be burnt. Ink on skin was more permanent than paper, and that would have to do. 

***

Chirrut had been speaking for so long that he was breathless now, his chest rising fast and shallow beneath Baze’s fist. Not for the first time, Baze wished he could breathe for him, but he had learned long ago that Chirrut would see that as a disfavour. And besides, that was an impossibility.

So he turned his head and pressed a long kiss to his partner’s temple instead, and splayed his hand above his ribs.

“I never knew,” Bodhi said, his voice shaky. “I never knew that happened.”

“You were taken from Jedha very young,” Baze said. It was not meant as reassurance, but a statement of fact. Bodhi sagged down anyway, starting to pluck at the sheets again.

“Why do I not know?”

There were so many reasons, Baze thought. Reasons as many as the corpses that lied upon the streets of Jedha; as infinite as the drops of blood that had seeped into the sand that strangely never turned red. There were many, but only one that Bodhi would immediately understand.

“The hungry and the desperate have no use for history.”

Bodhi barked a laugh, low and bitter, the sound of old wounds twisted into scars that ached with every twitch, every breath. He dug his knuckles into his eyes. 

Beside him, Jyn and Cassian watched. They were audience for this, this sharing of the history of a lost city that had its roots twined deep around their feet no matter how far Bodhi had been brought and Baze had ran. Baze watched them and wondered if the twinge of jealousy that was now skittering across his skin was theirs.

Jyn, orphan twice-abandoned, had had her roots ripped out of her with such force that she still dripped heart’s blood with every step. Cassian, a soldier-child of rebels, was tied to a cause that wove its web with words but had no form real enough to touch. If they felt jealous of the palpable grief of all three Jedhans, Baze would not blame them.

He knew how it felt like to have no home. He always had, of course, but he had been as foolish as they were now lost.

“Did…” Cassian started, then licked his lips. Arms wrapped around the back of a chair, spine and legs braced by metal that dwarfed him, he looked suddenly young. Jyn glanced at him, and placed a hand on his shoulder. 

He sighed, and said. “In many world that I’ve seen, people forgot their differences when the Empire came. The invasion galvanised so many of them. They were afraid, of course, but even afraid… they were united.”

Chirrut’s hand tightened around his wrist. When he shook this time, Baze knew that it was not because of grief, but an old, old hurt. He shook his head, opening his mouth, but it was Bodhi who spoke.

“They didn’t.” When Cassian looked at him, Bodhi smiled with eyes like open wounds. “Things were really bad when… when the Empire came. They… I…”

Baze did not need Bodhi to finish to feel his guilt. He could see in Jyn’s eyes, and the way Chirrut squeezed Bodhi’s hand tight, that they both understood. Cassian tensed.

“I went with them willingly, you see?” Bodhi told the sheets, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. “It wasn’t… I wasn’t _taken_. They didn’t kidnap me or, or anything, because I went willingly and I was, I was paid, you know? I was…” 

“What was it that you needed?” Chirrut asked, for he had always known the right time for cruelty’s kindness.

“Food,” Bodhi said, hoarse. “Food and medicine for my mother and sister.” 

***

In the histories of Jedha that hopefully would be written in the ages to come, they would say that, when the Empire came, the people of the city rose up and fought. In cold Basic letters written on datapad screens, they would tell stories of noble heroes who gave their lives for the sake of fighting away evil, of the brave commoners who chained themselves to each other and surrounded the walls of their Temple so the stormtroopers would not knock down the bricks.

And all of those histories would only be lies and bedtime stories for children.

The Empire came to Jedha first as saviours. 

Dreams propelled the revolutionaries to victory; pride drove the defeated to their deaths. But both dreams and pride were much like smoke, settling into nothing but scatterings of ash that blew away at the first strong breeze.

They elected a King and ministers were now chosen by the people, too, instead of officials handpicked by a Lord. But names and gestures were like seeds in Jedha: rare to take root, rarer to bear fruit; easily blown away in the first storm.

And the storms took, and took, and took.

It was the Temple that received the first emissaries of the Empire. They did not call themselves as such then, only traders who offered credits and food and medical supplies in return for kyber. The Temple, dependent on donations in a city of the poor to feed streets of the starving, left its doors open. People, the Masters intoned, were more important than principles. The kyber was sacred, but its sacredness was vital to the Force, and the Force was in all life.

So it was that the first stores of kyber were delivered by the Masters into the hands of the Empire.

On that day, Baze had stood on the left of their oldest Master, and Chirrut on the right. They were Masters by then, having achieved the highest _duan_ , the eighth. The lightbow slung on Baze’s back was made by his own hands, and Chirrut had carved his new staff himself from the wood of an ueti tree he had found after three months of pilgrimage north of the city, and topped it with a piece of kyber given to him when he had achieved his seventh _duan_.

With the kyber, the Temple gave the Empire the city, too. The Temple had always been the city’s heart, the kyber the glittering symbol of its soul. 

They took the youth first: luring them with jobs as pilots and grand tales of seeing the universe beyond Jedha’s skies, setting spiked nets of contracts over them once they stepped into a shuttle.

When the youth were mostly gone, they came for the children, lowering their age requirements until even those whose cheeks were still round and soft with childhood were running up eagerly into their shuttles. These children they pinned like butterflies to their walls, decorating the insides of their stormtrooper uniforms with their bodies.

Slowly, the city emptied. But still the people did not see. They were desperate and hungry and sick; they could see little but the money and food and medicine held temptingly close to their reach.

The money continued to flow. They continued to eat, and breathe.

When the first wave of stormtroopers came, when the first bomb went off right outside the Temple’s gates, the Temple slammed its doors shut. But it was already too late: the night after, Baze woke to Chirrut’s screams as the Jedi were dying galaxies away. The Force shook so much even Baze could feel it.

It continued to shake for the next nights; Baze no longer remembered how many. Only moments stood out: strapping Chirrut into his bed – _their_ bed – with his own tremulous hands, his own voice rasping to rawness as he tried to raise it above Chirrut’s endless screams; hearing the news of the Jedi younglings who had died from those who were Force-attuned but not as much as Chirrut, those who could still speak.

Waking, one morning, to see pale blue having taken over the dark diamonds of Chirrut’s eyes, his world having gone forever dark. 

Holding onto Chirrut, his hand splayed over the incomplete heron on his back, eyes closed as he tried to hold himself together while Chirrut fell apart, over and over. In fear, in anger, in pain relentless and unending.

When Chirrut could speak again, their bed was gone. The Temple’s bricks, having stood for centuries, had been ripped apart with nothing left but pieces of pebble and stone. Baze had thrown Chirrut over his back, grabbed his lightbow and Chirrut’s staff, and he had run. He had tried to take down as many stormtroopers as he could.

But Baze had always been selfish. With his red under-robes bright like blood poppies, he had turned towards his personal sun, and ignored the shadows’ screams.

“I saw all of them as they died,” Chirrut said.

They were hidden in an abandoned guard post at the edge of the city. In the distance, black smoke continued to coil out from the remains of the Temple. 

“All of them,” Chirrut repeated. His hand clawed at Baze’s shoulder. The lightning flowers writ in white ink, still incomplete, on Baze’s arm were drowned out now by the angry red welts left by his nails. “Eventually, I wanted it to stop. I didn’t want to see anymore.”

With every piece of kyber sold, with every youth and every child who had disappeared, with every credit that had rested on a Master’s closing fist, fractures had appeared on Baze’s bone-fragile faith. But it had held.

Then the Temple shook, and its bricks fell apart. Then the Masters and Guardians and acolytes died, one by one and then almost all at once. Baze’s faith held on, barely clinging to breath.

“You’re saying that the Force _wants_ you to be blind,” Baze could barely grit out.

“The Force granted me my wish,” Chirrut said. His lips curved up. Baze could no longer see if his smile was true or false; his eyes were left a pale, featureless blue.

This was the final blow.

“No,” he said. “No. You can’t say that. You _can’t_.”

“It’s the truth, Baze,” Chirrut said. He pulled away first, huddling against the dusty wall of the guard’s room. His arms wrapped around his staff and Baze’s lightbow instead, holding onto both so tightly that the wood and metal were already making their marks on his skin. “I asked, and the Force granted it to me.”

He took a deep breath. “All is as—” 

His head slammed back against the wall as Baze slapped a hand over his mouth. “ _Don’t say that_.”

Baze could stand the insidious rot of the Empire creeping upon his city. He could stand the Temple’s fall. He could stand having to mourn all of their brothers and sisters. He could stand having his home ripped away from him. He had withstood all of it before, in different forms, and he knew he could still hold his head up high.

But this…

“You were screaming for days,” he said, barely able to keep his voice steady. “Almost every moment. When you stopped, it was to sob. When you ran out of breath for either, you shook so much that…” His voice died. He dropped his hand from Chirrut’s mouth, and cupped his face instead. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that.”

“How can I deny something when it has shown me its power?” Chirrut’s head was tipped towards the ceiling, his pale eyes turned towards the spider that spun its web in the corner. “How can I deny the Force when I can _feel_ it even now?”

“Not deny it,” Baze barely managed to say. He just needed… just needed Chirrut to…

“I can’t,” Chirrut said.

Baze lowered his head, his hands. His fingers clenched on top of his thighs. He knew Chirrut would not see it. 

Sorrow and guilt hung around them, thick and heavy. Was it his own, or Chirrut’s? He did not know. He no longer knew anything. He could hear the weak wing-bones of the swallows beneath his feet breaking.

Silence stretched between them. Baze recalled a silence like this, once, long ago. His hand reached back, and he pulled the cord from his hair. The strands fell forward. Even matted and twisted with sweat and dust and dirt, the ends brushed against the dusty floor. He had not cut his hair since he and Chirrut started making clandestine trips to the tattooist together.

Chirrut did not respond. Chirrut did not reach for him, and bury his hands in his hair to stroke through the strands like he usually did. Chirrut could not see anything he did, and would not respond in the same way as he usually would. Not with all that Baze had done. Not with all that he had said.

“You should go,” Chirrut said.

In the distance, there was the sound of gunshots. But Baze’s ears were filled more with the snapping of twigs and bones beneath his feet, and the rushing of the winds in his ears when as he fell and fell.

They had been so close to reaching the clouds.

“Yeah,” Baze said. It took, strangely, no effort at all to keep his voice steady. “I really should, shouldn’t I?”

He had never known where his belief came from. When it was lost, he had no idea how to regain it.

“I’ll be alright,” Chirrut told him. He was smiling again, faint. “The Force will guide me.”

The words should hurt, and they did. But it was not a searing pain. There was only a dull ache, like a small breeze blowing across a wound scraped hollow, the raw nerves already scarred over.

Standing, Baze turned away.

“Your lightbow.”

“Keep it,” Baze said. He did not look back. He took a deep breath and said, in his still-hesitant Cantonese, “You will learn to be better at it than I am, anyway.”

He hadn’t needed to say _you_ ; not in Cantonese. He hoped that Chirrut knew what he meant with pronoun and language both. He hoped that it would not worsen the wound his leaving would cause.

“Alright,” Chirrut said. His voice was softer than a whisper.

Baze started to walk. He headed out of the guard post, and went back into the city. There were Imperial shuttles all over the place already, and stormtroopers swarmed the streets. There was a knife on the floor, half-lying on top of a bloodied wrist. The rest of the body was missing.

Taking the knife, Baze sliced off his hair until the ends reached only the bottoms of his ears. He left the strands lying there, on the street, and dropped the knife on top. The sand would bury it all, soon.

He ambushed a stormtrooper, killed him, and took his uniform and blaster. He stowed away on an Imperial ship by allowing himself to be herded along, head down and feeling like an unwieldy bantha. 

He left Jedha behind. He left Chirrut behind.

Even years later, he could not say if he regretted it. 

***

“It’s a common story,” Bodhi finished, sighing.

He looked exhausted, wrung out as he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Baze could feel the weight on him; the guilt of partaking in the Empire’s atrocities and the twisting grief that all those he had done everything for were all dead. His mother, his sister.

Even Galen Erso.

Reaching out, Baze closed his hand around Bodhi’s shoulder, gripping hard. Bodhi rocked on the bed, face as pale as the death they had barely escaped. He shook his head.

“You still…” he started, looking at Baze. “You still haven’t answered Jyn’s question, you know.”

Baze blinked. He made a sound that lilting upwards, a verbal question mark.

“We told you of Jedha,” Chirrut said, sounding equally confused.

“That’s about why the time wasn’t right,” Bodhi said. “It’s not about why _marriage_ isn’t right.”

Even if Baze could understand that he was stuck onto this because it offered a good distraction, he couldn’t help the irritated huff that escaped him. Chirrut was laughing however, silently like he had done since he woke up, with his body still healing and any exertion causing too much pain.

He opened his mouth. 

At that moment, a roar loud enough to rock the base’s walls echoed around them. All of them froze, turning towards the door. Chirrut cocked his head to the side.

“Looks like we’re not going to die today,” he said.

There would be time for them to finish their stories. Time enough, perhaps, for Jedha’s to be written down and stored, so that no one forget. Time enough for Bodhi to find his place to belong. 

“The Death Star is gone,” Jyn said. She seemed to need to speak aloud to make it all real.

The young ones looked at each other. Then, before Baze could stop them, they practically leapt towards Chirrut, hands grasping at his fingers and wrists, everywhere they could reach.

“He did it?” Bodhi stumbled out. “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

“ _We_ did it,” Chirrut corrected him. He had no hands free, so Baze brushed Bodhi on the jaw on his behalf. “You did it.”

“That’s right,” Cassian said. He dropped his hand on Bodhi’s shoulder, squeezing. “None of this would’ve been possible if you hadn’t done anything.”

“I…” Bodhi’s eyes darted from one to another. He swallowed, hard. “I didn’t… It wasn’t…”

“My father would’ve been proud of you,” Jyn said. When Bodhi jerked to stare at her, she smiled. “He was usually right about people, and he was right about you. You did make it right.”

Before Chirrut could nudge him, Baze was already leaning further back against the wall. Chirrut huffed again, turning a smile upwards to him, and Baze shrugged now because he knew Chirrut could feel it.

He watched, and Chirrut listened, as Cassian and Jyn wrapped themselves around Bodhi. Holding him tight.

“It’s only right,” Chirrut whispered to him in Mandarin. “They should all have a home.”

In the language they shared, once written with ink from a clan and a Temple that no longer existed, on paper made by hands long dead, home was a roof on top of an outstretched wing. Long strokes flowing from wrists forced into gentle swiftness, crafting feathers much like those that peeped from the curve of Chirrut’s shoulder.

“You meddling idiot,” Baze returned in Cantonese. But he didn’t stop Chirrut’s fingers from creeping up his sleeve to trace the longest spike of the lightning flower, right where it stopped above his wrist.

***

Seven years passed before Baze returned to Jedha. 

He found Chirrut on the streets. His eyes were still the colour seared into the back of Baze’s own; the colour he had used to replace the white for the lightning flowers on his arms. An uncommon colour, and expensive, but it shone through, light and clean, even when he was elbows-deep in blood and stank of gunpowder.

Baze didn’t approach him immediately. He lingered back, hopefully far away enough that Chirrut would not be able to hear him, and watched with his heart swelling as Chirrut seemed to go through his day without any trouble. 

The city was in ruins, the marketplace still a hive of activity but one filled with tension, and the tromping footsteps of stormtroopers echoed and echoed. The Temple had fallen to pieces, ripped apart with its heart and soul carted away piece by piece. 

But Chirrut was still alive. He still stood tall, and walked with his head lifted. That was enough.

Baze had always been a selfish man. The bridge of birds was now too far for him to reach; possibly too far for him to ever touch again. But he had a ladder built of lightning flowers on his arm the colour of Chirrut’s eyes, and perhaps one day they might head for the clouds again. 

He announced his presence by shooting in the heads of three stormtroopers who had their guns aimed at Chirrut because Chirrut decided to step in front of a child-thief. 

“Unfair,” Chirrut said, the first word he said to Baze in seven years slipped out through a half-crooked mouth. “You didn’t let me show off to you what I can do now.”

“You’re already showing off,” Baze said, utterly unsurprised that Chirrut had immediately known that it was him. His eyes went to the child – a little girl who couldn’t be more than five – and jerked his head. Her eyes darted between him and Chirrut, and she ran away.

“Don’t try one of those again!” Chirrut shouted after her. “They never have any money!”

She threw him an askance stare that had Baze’s shoulders shaking despite himself. When he looked back at Chirrut, there was a hand held out in his direction.

Sighing, Baze stepped over the fallen stormtroopers. He dropped his repeater cannon into Chirrut’s palm, and held it there while he ran his fingertips over the grooves and lines. 

“You’ve lost whatever little finesse you’d earned before,” Chirrut said, tone chiding.

“Finesse is a liability when you’re in my line of work,” Baze shot back, dry.

“How far a Guardian has fallen,” Chirrut said, shaking his head as he let go of the cannon. “Becoming a mercenary. Or is it an assassin?”

Both words fitted and neither mattered. Baze huffed. 

“You’re consorting with thieves, now?” he asked, lilting his voice like he would have once raised an eyebrow. “How far a Guardian has fallen.”

“We are all thieves here,” Chirrut laughed, head tipped back. “What would you call people who continue to live while death waves its flag above their heads?”

“Hah,” Baze said.

He had practiced over the last seven years to turn shrugs into grunts, shakes of the head into huffs, eye-rolls into sighs, and raised eyebrows to certain notes deep in his throat. He had practiced on people who did not know him at all, until even they could understand.

All for him to be ready for this day. It was not faith, but inevitability. He would return when he was ready.

Chirrut seemed to know, too, because his smile widened. Baze stepped closer without needing to be asked, and held himself still as Chirrut shifted his staff to the crook of his elbow and reached out with his hands.

There were new calluses on Chirrut’s fingertips, but his touch was as gentle and familiar as ever. He had never done this, never traced each of Baze’s features as if trying to memorise them, but his hands cupping Baze’s cheeks were familiar enough.

“You’re not mad at me for leaving?”

Leaning in, Chirrut touched their foreheads together. His hand sank into Baze’s hair – shorter than what he had been used to so the strands wouldn’t catch in his armour, but grown long again – before he breathed a kiss over his lips.

“You needed to leave, and I told you to go,” Chirrut said. “I knew the Force would bring you back.”

“I came back all on my own,” Baze said, but the protest was weak.

The loss of his faith did not mean that he had stopped believing in the existence of the Force. It was there, he knew. But only fools would believe in, and worship, something that was capable of terrible cruelty towards those who loved it.

Fools like Chirrut.

Baze hadn’t come to peace with it. But like the blood that had sunk into his skin and the metal and smoke that haunted his nose, he had grown used to it. Like one grew used to the presence of a weapon.

“Come home with me,” Chirrut said.

“I’m already home,” Baze pointed out.

The Temple had fallen and the city was broken. But Baze’s faith had rarely rested in places; that was for Chirrut. His faith was here, resting in this heart that was beating steadily beneath his hand.

If Chirrut was Jedha’s, then Baze was Chirrut’s. He had grown used to that, too.

“Home where I can get you to take this thing off,” Chirrut said. He knocked on Baze’s armour with his knuckles, an exaggerated frown twisting his lips. “I’m mad at you about _that_.” 

Despite himself, Baze laughed. He switched his repeater cannon off, and dropped it. It smacked against his calf, but he ignored the lopsided weight tugging on his back to clasp Chirrut’s face with both hands, bringing him close.

There, surrounded by the dead bodies of stormtroopers, in a city with what had been and was theirs all swept away, Chirrut kissed him the same way as he always had. A little impatient, a little rough, his fingers tugging on Baze’s hair and his teeth scraping over his lips. 

He pulled a face when they pulled back. “You need to shave,” he said. “I have your beard hairs stuck between my teeth.”

Chirrut surely felt those same hairs when he was touching him. Chirrut the irreverent, who grinned when he complained, who held his staff so tight against his shoulder like the wood connected him to the kyber that he needed to keep breathing.

“You need to get used to it,” Baze drawled. His fingertips brushed over the edge of Chirrut’s brow, right above his pale, pale eyes. “Now take me home.”

Laughing, Chirrut took a step back. Baze picked up his cannon, and placed it on top of the power pack. They reached out for each other at the same time, Chirrut pressing himself against his side.

Their steps didn’t fall back into sync automatically. Baze had to adjust, for now Chirrut no longer lifted his staff as he walked, but instead held in front of him. He did not try to nudge Chirrut away from obstacles, but followed him with every step. His did notice, however, that Chirrut’s shoes made almost no sound; the soles were worn thin with use.

The room Chirrut lived in was in an area that used to be the Indian quarters, before the Empire set its claws upon Jedha and tore out its bones and spilled its blood, leaving an empty corpse with little need for segregation. Chirrut took the stairs two at a time with his staff lifted. The thing was put into a corner once Chirrut opened the door. 

Baze noticed the signs first when Chirrut tucked his shoes against the wall: there was a space beside them just large enough for Baze’s own boots. There was a basin, half-filled, with a washcloth hanging over it and another folded to its side. There were two mugs sitting near a cell-powered kettle, one stained and the other pristine.

So Chirrut had been preparing for him, too.

Warmth filled him, tasting of wonder. Like seeing snow for the very first time.

He jerked his eyes away so they would not fill with tears. That was when he saw it: tucked against the bedroll – wide enough for two – was his old lightbow.

“You’re right, you know,” Chirrut said. “I’m better with it now than you were.” He flashed Baze a smile, so familiar in its cheekiness. “Probably _much_ better than you are now.”

“I never doubted that,” Baze told him, entirely honest. “It’s far more yours than mine, now.”

“It will always be yours,” Chirrut said. “Now come here.”

He was seated beside the little table with the kettle, his legs sprawled wide. Baze took off his armour and power bank, setting both away against a wall, before he dropped down in front of him, his own legs crossing on top of Chirrut’s. 

How many times had they sat like this together when they had been younger? The habit had faded but was still familiar, like the washed-out red of the under-robe exposed beneath the black. 

But this was new: his hands tangling with Chirrut’s, bringing them up to the catches of his armour. He let him figure out how to release the catches before bringing them to the next one until all four had snapped open.

The metal dropped onto the cold stone floor with a loud, rattling _thump_.

“So inelegant,” Chirrut sniffed. But his eager hands were slipping beneath Baze’s jumpsuit, and Baze laughed before he caught his wrists.

“I take it that you hate it,” he drawled. He did not need to wonder why: aside from the leather on the right side of his robes, Chirrut had not changed a single thing about his attire.

It was a strange sight to have those pale blue, pupil-less eyes rolling upwards at him. Baze’s breath caught, anger rising within him. But he knew its shape, knew its taste, and he drove it down, hissing a breath through his teeth while he brought Chirrut’s hand to rest on his chest, right above his heart.

“Here,” he murmured, switching back to Cantonese. “My heart still beats in tandem with yours.”

Taking Baze’s other hand, Chirrut pressed it over his own chest. Baze spread his fingers out immediately, closing his eyes as he felt the steady rhythm thrumming against his own pulse.

“And mine with yours,” Chirrut replied, in Mandarin even flatter than it had used to be.

“You’re out of practice,” Baze teased. His other hand cupped Chirrut’s cheek, thumb stroking over the curve of the cheekbone, brushing right beneath an eye.

Chirrut tilted his head. His eyes remained open, fixed somewhere to Baze’s left, as he nuzzled his palm. “My usual teacher left,” he murmured. “But now he has come back, and I can improve.”

It should be impossible that they were teasing each other about inanities already; that Baze’s abandonment was treated now as just another inconvenience. But Chirrut had always been a man of contradictions and impossibilities. 

Closing his eyes, Baze leaned in and pressed their foreheads together again.

He had missed this the most. Their breaths mingling together while the steady beat of their hearts rang in their ears. When the world, the city, and their histories no longer mattered because there was just the two of them, with all else fallen away.

“I have something to ask you,” Chirrut said after a long moment, not nearly long enough for Baze to fill his lungs up fully with his warm exhales. “Do you remember the first time we kissed? What we talked about?”

“Are you going senile?” Baze teased. Chirrut drummed his fingers against his jaw, and he let out a soft chuckle. “Of course I do.”

Years – decades, really – had passed, yet it was as clear in his mind as day. He had revisited the memory throughout these seven years, reminding himself just how far they had walked on the bridge of birds together. Hoping and hoping that he could reach for the clouds again, and it was not too late.

“Those two mugs,” Chirrut whispered against his skin. “Will you bring them over?”

Pulling back, Baze stared at him, eyes wide.

There was a ceremony that was the same for them both, connected more through written words than spoken language. A woman and a man, kneeling in front of each other with their arms entwined and hands closed around cups of wine. 

To drink from each other’s cup, and thus swear to be by each other’s side for the rest of their lives.

“It’ll only be water,” Chirrut said. It sounded like an apology.

“We don’t need anything more,” Baze said, fierce. He reached out without looking towards the mugs. The stained one, clearly Chirrut’s, he pressed into his hands. He held the other with his own, biting his lip to control the sudden trembling in his limbs.

The kettle still held water, long-cooled.

“Did you know it will be today?” Baze asked.

Shaking his head, Chirrut wrapped both hands around his mug, holding it steady as Baze poured. “It’s a habit to keep some handy,” he said, grinning out of the corner of his mouth. “Sorry to disappoint.”

Fighting down a chuckle – this was serious, after all – Baze reached over and brushed his fingers over Chirrut’s cheek, right below where his eyes creased tight. “And here I thought you were now all-knowing.”

Chirrut snorted. He shifted the mug to one hand, and beckoned Baze with the other. Baze obligingly raised his arm. Their wrists brushed, and they slid their arms in tandem with each other until the mugs were held an inch from their lips.

“Are you sure?” Baze couldn’t help but ask.

Trailing his free hand over Baze’s jaw, Chirrut buried it into his hair again. “You came back,” he said, and tilted his mug in Baze’s direction.

Leaning in, Baze pressed his mouth against the rim. “I will go where you go,” he said, hoarse.

Chirrut lifted, and the water – clean and cool – slid down his throat. Baze’s hands shook for a moment before he steadied himself, and lifted his own mug.

“And I will always lead you home,” Chirrut said. He drank with his eyes closed, the pads of his thumb brushing over Baze’s eyelids, one after the other.

He caught the quiet tears as they fell.

Eventually, they let go of each other. Baze took the mugs and placed them back on the table. He made to cup Chirrut’s face with his hands again, but Chirrut caught his wrists, and shook his head.

“There’s something else I want to show you,” he said. Then he pulled away, and tugged at the ties holding his robes together until they fell apart.

There were new scars dotting his skin, some terribly angry, barely and badly healed. Baze’s heart ached, his vow still new on his tongue but already etched deep into his bones. Then Chirrut shifted back, and turned around.

Seven years ago, the heron was wingless with one toeless foot lifted and the other standing on nothing. But now its wings were spread outwards, up to the curves of Chirrut’s shoulders. It now stood, elegant and impossible, upon a pond of rippling water. Soft clouds curved around the body, turning to mist around the lifted foot.

Splaying his hand over the width of the heron’s body, Baze swallowed hard. The bridge of birds had been broken, but they no longer needed it. Baze had wings large enough to straddle the earth and the skies; strong enough to follow the currents of the winds all the way up to the clouds without falling.

“It’s supposed to be grey, almost silver,” Chirrut murmured.

Thin soles on the only pair of shoes Chirrut owned. A basin instead of a tap. Bedroll instead of a proper bed. The stone beneath his knees, uncovered.

Grey ink was expensive. “It is,” he choked out.

With his other hand, Baze took one of Chirrut’s, and rested it on his arm. “I had mine finished, too.”

“Is it still white?” Chirrut asked. They had chosen white for Chirrut’s contrariness; white the colour of surprise.

Shaking his head just enough for Chirrut to feel against his hair, Baze said, “No. It’s blue, now.”

“Like the sky?”

Baze pressed his lips against Chirrut’s temple. “No,” he repeated, and smiled soft against Chirrut's skin, his lips against the thin layer of dust from Jedha’s streets. “Blue like how kyber shards hidden within iron ore and soil shone under the marketplace’s sunshine. Blue like the under-robes of the fifth _duan_ Guardians.” He took a deep breath. “Blue like the colour of your eyes.”

“ _Oh,_ ” Chirrut breathed. He turned his head, and Baze caught his quiet sob with his own lips. Chirrut clung to him, crumpling Baze’s jumpsuit under his fingers.

When Baze pulled away, it was to kiss Chirrut’s Force-blinded eyes. One after the other, tasting salt and breathing in his vow over them again.

He would go where Chirrut went. He would one day carry them to the skies on wings strong and wide, with feet steady to the ground.

For Chirrut had promised.

***

By the time all of the pilots had landed, the party was in full swing and Jyn - the most able-bodied of all of them - had managed to wrangle a few medics into finding them some automated wheelchairs and heavy-duty crutches.

But all five of them still ended up in the corner of the festivities, ignored as everyone swarmed around the boy hero Luke Skywalker. Baze did not mind; he was not one to crave attention or glory. Jyn was shaking her head to hide her smile behind her bangs. Even Bodhi looked less pale as he soaked in the noise of delirious joy around them.

Chirrut reached out and touched his hand. When Baze turned to him, he was smiling. They would have a chance to meet the boy hero, Baze wanted to say, but Chirrut tilted his head towards Cassian instead.

Cassian, standing there, his knuckles white around the arms of his chair. Miasma coiled around his tense form, choking with so many emotions that Baze could barely peel them apart.

"You should do it," he whispered to Chirrut. But Chirrut only smiled wider, showing gum, and tapped his own wheelchair as excuse.

Sighing far more heavily than he felt, Baze nodded. He navigated his crutches over to Cassian. The Captain was so caught within his dark thoughts that he didn't notice Baze there until he had set the crutches beside the chair and leaned down to look him in the eye.

"They have not forgotten the sacrifices that your people have made," he said, voice firm. Gently, cautiously, he brushed his hand over Cassian's knuckles. "Or ours. Or Kaytoo either."

Even over the din of the crowd, he could hear the hitch in Cassian's breathing. 

"An enemy can galvanise the spirits," Baze continued. "But so could a hero."

"How..." Cassian choked out. His eyes darted to the side, towards Chirrut who had his head bent towards Bodhi.

"He didn't tell me," Baze shook his head.

He saw the moment when realisation and wonder sank into Cassian's eyes. He felt the same himself when he woke and the air shifted and moved in ways palpable to his senses again.

When he allowed himself to feel again.

"I thought you didn't believe in the Force," Cassian said.

Baze shook his head. "I didn't _trust_ it," he corrected.

He still didn’t, but he had always known. Not in the same way Chirrut did, a feeling that spread into the nerves and spiralled into the mind as words; not with the same surety. His knowledge came to him like threads materialising on his fingers, a cat’s cradle that he had to unravel on his own. He was selfish, so it had been too long since he had wanted to.

But Chirrut had vowed to lead him home.

  
by the amazing [jardenvargen](http://jadenvargen.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> The story of the bridge of birds/swallows is based upon [_The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl_](http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/835790-the-cowherd-and-the-weaver-girl/). The heron, in case it's not clear, represents pathways, while the lightning flowers are stolen the beautiful [_lockstep, frogmarch_](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9373901) by [chuchisushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi). The story of the man whose honour is etched on skin is [Yue Fei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Fei#Yue_Fei.27s_tattoo), another folk hero.
> 
> The government of the Lord of Jedha is based upon the Qing-era government (the men’s shaved forehead and braid looks like [this](https://40.media.tumblr.com/c0d6a1666e8f2db50610e0ddf0de9851/tumblr_inline_nlxxa30dbz1rfyc6s_500.jpg)), the revolutionaries vaguely on the Kuomintang, and the Empire on Communist China. Jedha’s population demographics are based on countries all over Southeast Asia, but in particular Malaysia and Singapore. 
> 
> My primary inspirations for this: my instinctive twitch whenever I see someone referring the two of them as ‘husbands’ due the Chinese ideas of marriage; Baze, Chirrut and Bodhi all being from Jedha meaning that it’s definitely not China but more of a city of immigrants like my own city; and trying to fit Chinese cultural norms and traumas into _Star Wars_ due to Baze and Chirrut being played by Chinese actors. See [this essay](http://evocating.tumblr.com/post/156737489504/bazechirrut-in-the-context-of-chinese-culture) for more detail. This is like the fic version of that essay.
> 
> I live for comments. Please validate me.


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